Month: March 2014

I’ve written before about the negative consequences of the lack of industry alignment between ITIL-focused ITSM functions, and the IT Asset Management groups which typically evolved somewhat separately.

A recent CapGemini study of CIOs and IT decision makers concisely illustrated one impact this is having:

48% believe their business has more applications than it needs (up from 34% over the previous three years).

Only 37% percent believe the majority of their applications are mission critical.

70% believe at least a fifth of their company’s applications share similar functionality and could be consolidated.

The majority believe a fifth of those applications should be retired or replaced.

This shows a very strong consensus amongst IT leaders: IT is spending too much money and time on too many applications, with too much overlap. And in the rapidly evolving application landscape, this impact is by no means limited to traditional on-premise software: Skyhigh’s 2013 study on cloud service adoption found that enterprise respondents used, on average, well over 500 cloud services (the largest number of services found in one organisation was an eye-watering 1769).[Update for Q1 2015: SkyHigh now put the average at over 900]

If we want to remain serious about understanding the business services our IT organizations are managing, overseeing and underpinning, surely we can’t lose track of key assets like this?

How can IT possibly aim to control this sprawl, understand its impact, pinpoint its risks and and remove its vulnerabilities, if there is no unified overseeing function? Who is tracking which users are entitled to which services? Who ensures that users are equipped with the right services, and who removes their access once they leave, to ensure both data security and cost control? Who can identify the impact on key services if an application is removed or consolidated?

Concerningly, this does not appear to be high on the agenda in ITSM discussions. We still see two separate threads in the conference ecosystem: ITSM conferences rarely address asset management. Asset management conferences talk about suppliers and infrastructure without putting them in the context of the services they underpin. My own role involves product management of an ITAM system which is part of an ITSM suite, so I attend both sets of conferences, see both parallel tracks, and experience nagging concerns in each case that the other side of the picture is overlooked.

Recent initiatives such as the Pink Think Tank 14 are, welcomely, addressing in increased detail the multi-sourced, multi-vendor evolution of IT service delivery, but there still does not appear to be a detailed focus on the actual assets and software being supplied by those vendors. That’s a gap. Those vendors fill the IT environment with assets, from physical kit through software services to less tangible “assets” like critical people with vital knowledge. All those things cost money. They may have contractual associations. We may need to know, very quickly, who owns and supports them. And if a supplier is replaced, we need to know what they might take with them.

The harsh reality, as clearly shown by CapGemini’s study, is that CIOs and leaders are asking questions about consolidation that will require a detailed, holistic understanding of what we are actually spending money on, and why it is there.